Does anyone here use it, is it any good?

It's slower, less compatible, and overall not really that great of an operating systems (a lot more bugs, etc). Don't bother, I'd say.

yes. and yes. assuming you can get all your drivers.

There's no noticible speed improvement, driver support is nil, some software is incompatible for no apparent reason, etc.

In other words, don't bother.

*nods*

I wont risk it then.

Who in the hell would need 2^64 (18,446,744,073,709,551,616) bytes of...stuff??

Wtf are you talking about.

Congratulations you have gained a new level in Nerd. [/COLOR][/I][/SIZE]

I tried it and quite liked it (there's a free trial on the MS site), but I couldn't find any drivers for my modem. So basically, great for games and stuff but I couldn't use the internet.

Athlon 64s only have 48-bit addressing and with memory paging Windows can already address more than 4.2 GB.

64-bit code is slower than 32-bit code because it uses twice as much cache space (instruction and data), so the probability of a cache miss becomes twice as high. Plus, all of your older applications (namely games) will execute on Win64 using virtualization - a process called WOW64, which carries its own overhead. Win64 isn't worth it by any stretch - and the people who claim it is are merely suffering from the placebo effect.

So...what's the point of 64-bit processors?

You know what? I'm not entirely sure. They're not even special in the sense that they can handle large numbers, since it's trivial to do that in software.

They wouldn't be bad for scientific applications if they had more cache. The beefiest Athlon 64 only has 1 MB of L2 cache while the Itanium, RISC and Opteron server-side equivalents are 2 MB - 12 MB.

Like you should be talking? Youre the one bringing up Windows 64 bit

Erm, I was commenting his list of numbers. I don't know what the **** he's talking about. If it does have meaning, and he does know it... well there you go, that explains the blue text in my post.

As with all new technologies, there's always room for improvement and modifications. Same with dual-core--if they ever figure out a hardware-route of assigning tasks to different cores, then it's gonna be an excellent method of increasing processing power. That will probably take a while yet (a year, I estimate) but I see it happening.

The major issue is that the amount of RAM they can handle is capped at 4GB.

Obviously, at this point, it really makes no difference, but it is a limit, so they are trying to move to 64bit before RAM capping becomes an issue.

2^64 is the number of bits. That long string of numbers is 2^64 calculated it out. The condenscention wasn't needed.

I just really hope you realize (as well for Mbeggar) that that was meant as a joke and not as an offense.